Dave Snowden has a new post up this week in which he gives us a situational snapshot about a big chunk of his body of work he has been developing for a number of years now. I love these posts because every so often Dave publishes them to consolidate teaching he has done and methods he has been working on in practice. They have the energy of “okay…I think I’ve got something here. Check it out.”
I alos love these posts becasue they always offer me something to dive further into and ways to improve my own practice.
So first go and read his post, “Estuarine mapping first edition.“
The metaphor of an estuary is powerful in many ways and round where I live, I get to hang out in estuaries. These are geographic features which are critical habitats and essential incubators for life in near-shore marine coastal ecosystems. The Estuary pictured above is at the end of Mannion Bay below where I live. At one end Killarney Creek flows through a lagoon and over a weir into a tidal estuary that experience 4.5 meter tidal ranges. Sometimes the water flows upstream into the lagoon, making the water there brackish and changing the kinds of life that lives and thrives there. At other times of the water rushing down the river pushes fresh water far out into the bay, delivering debris and food to the marine creatures that only live in the salt water of the bay. As Dave points out in his post “In an estuary (but not a delta) the water flows in and flows out. There are things you can do only at the turn of the tide. There may be granite cliffs which you only have to check every decade or so, sandbanks that are checked daily and so on.” And so the context determines what is possible, and the context changes, so cadence and rhythm and timing are important.
A couple of things stand out for me in Dave’s post, and I want to explore these in my practice in the next ittle while. First Dave has been talking about his typology of constraints for quite a while now, and that’s been massively influential in my own work. Dave’s typology currently is:
- Rigid or fixed, like a sea wall or dyke
- Elastic or Flexible
- Tethers – like a climbing rope they snap into place when you need them
- Permeable – some things can get through
- Phase shift – like Roe v Wade, there is a process in the system which can produce a sudden significant change
- Dark constraints – a reference to dark matter, we can see an effect but not what is creating the said effect
These are helpful and they help me think HOW to change the constraints in a system. When I introduce people to constraints I talk about first of all connecting and containing constraints (a distinction I also learned from Dave). I then break these down a bit further using material I learned from Dave and Glenda Eoyang in their works on containers, work I developed into a book chapter and a paper (original in English, updated in Japanese ) a number years ago. Connecting constraints influence the actions of agents as they relate to each other. and then we explore different kinds of constraints. Connecting constraints are connections and exchanges between agents in a system. Containing constraints are the attractors and boundaries in a system. And human systems have a special kind of constraint called identity that other complex system don’t have and that makes the field of anthro-complexity a distinct branch.
I teach these in a kind of scaffolded way (thanks Ann Pendelton and Dave for yet ANOTHER useful metaphor) by first having people look for patterns and then ask what constraints are keeping those patterns in place. Helpful patterns can be stabilized by tightening constraints, and unhelpful patterns can be broken by loosening constraints. We then start to find connections, exchanges, attractors, boundaries and identities and look for ways to shift them.
The problem with a simple scheme like that is that makes it seem like constraints are obvious and easy to spot and work with. So the scaffolding I use invites people to look for them specifically, but as Dave points out in the post, “The purpose of a typology is to see things from different perspectives not to allocate things to types – always a difficult thing to get across.” So what I’m taking from Dave’s work here is to move people quickly from the idea that “there are five kids of constraints” into a much more subtle and less easily defined and delineated set of constraints, because sometimes a connection is an attractor and a boundary is indistinguishable from an exchange and is also an identity, etc. You see the problem. We use a form to help people find these five, but in strategic work, we abandon that form after the first iteration of working with constraints. Complexity workers need to be good at finding subtle, context-specific constraints and TYPES of constraints. Dave’s post opens up possibilities for finding lots of different ways to name, think about and work with these things.
So I’m excited by the post and the links and thinking and it’s timely as we have a third iteration of the Complexity from the Inside Out course starting this week (do register if interested) and so I’ll have a chance to drop some of this thinking into my own practice imminently.
This weekend is Thanksgiving in Canada, and with that in mind, I want to once again lift my hands and gratitude to Dave for being so generous and uncompromising in his thinking and mentorship. I’ve learned an immense amount from him and continue to do so.
In our Complexity from the Inside Out program, we do a session on evaluation, looking at some of the implications that complexity has for traditional models of monitoring and evaluation. This is especially an issue in the non-profit world where organizations find themselves managing complexity while being subject to requirements from funders that treat their operations as if they were ordered and predictable.
It is common for participants in these sessions to ask the question “Complexity is all good, but how do we actually deal with the funding bodies that want us to measure everything and create targets?”
Well, this report from a series of conversation convened by the UN Development Program offers a helpful starting point for having these conversations with funders. Here are some of their framing questions:
- How can we measure in ways that enable and incentivize learning and adaptation?
- For whom and why do we measure (recognizing that measurement is often an extractive activity done to satisfy a donor rather than something with the primary objective of learning and empowering local change agents)?
- What should we measure when we are just starting out (e.g. at the intervention design stage) given we may not know what solutions or success will look like? What is the role of baselines and how do we change measures as we learn and adapt?
In my experience, having these conversations early on is critical so that a grantee working on a complex project and their funders can create an evaluation approach that is coherent with the work they are doing. In this article you will find many good conversations starters and framing ideas to help start this co-creation without alienating anyone in the conversation. It pays to meet people where they are at, and that includes funders and folks that are wedded to ordered approaches to evaluating change work despite the reality that those approaches might not work, or even be harmful, to a complex project.
Fall in the north is a time for teaching for me!. I have a few different courses and workshops on offer this fall, including our third cohort of Complexity from the Inside Out, which is a program Caitlin and I have put together from 20+ years of collective experience with dialogue and personal leadership tools in service of working with complexity.
I invite you to join us (and an amazing group of co-learners) for our fall cohort of this highly engaging, practice focussed program. Together we will explore and learn effective and meaningful ways to better understand and work with complexity at many scales and in different contexts. We know that complex challenges need to be engaged in multiple ways including practices and approaches focussed on the complexity of our inner human systems (mind and mindset, emotions, reactions, conditioned patterns, neurobiology and mystery); the space of engagement between us (in dialogue, collaboration and sensemaking in our teams, organizations, communities); and in our work to influence the larger systemic changes that are so needed with the many complex challenges of our times.
The Complexity Inside & Out Program includes:
- 8 engaging online learning and practice sessions.
- Including an Open Space session with your colleagues.
- 2 small group “learning pods” discussion sessions.
- Applied practice exercises
- Online classroom with recordings, resources, discussion space and more.
- Connection and co-learning with amazing colleagues from around the world
In the course we cover a number of tools and practices from various bodies of work including:
- Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework and his work on anthro-complexity
- Tools from Glenda Eoyang’s Human System Dynamics
- Participatory Narrative Inquiry and sense-making practices from Cynthia Kurtz’s work.
- Personal practice for working with limiting beliefs, the reactivity loop and internal narrative.
- Developmental and complexity focused evaluation
What we offer in this course is a framework that helps to links these areas of practice so that your work with complex challenges can develop coherence with both personal development and work in the world outside of yourself.
We focus on inquires that participants bring to the session too, and in the past two cohorts we have explored activism, equity and justice, various topics in community and organizational development, applications in education systems and the non-profit world. We have had some great cohorts full of folks who are working in all kinds of different contexts. The variety and diversity is a huge bonus, and this cohort is shaping up to be similar.
If you have no experience of complexity work, you will get a deep introduction to this field. For more experienced practitioners, we aim to support you hitting the next level in your practice. You are likely to learn a few new things and develop your own map of a coherence for complexity work that includes the personal as well as the systemic.
There are spaces left and we give a good team discount which allows you to come with your colleagues. Times will work well for folks in North and South America, Central and Western Europe and Africa. We are considering offering a cohort in the new year that will work for Australasia too, so if you are in that region, let us know.
Found this morning on Network Weaver:
Over the past few years, I have been increasingly influenced by the concept of “weaving” — what for me means connecting people, ideas, and projects to foster more collaborative social change.
Weaving is a skill, a mindset, and a way of being. More art than science, it requires deep listening, being responsive to interests and needs, and “sensing” opportunities to bring people or projects together.
Nice post on a set of practical strategies for increasing connections and exchanges at work. One of the more powerful ways to shift patterns in complex systems and catalyze new behaviours is to work with the constraints you can get your hands on. For folks without a lot of power or authority in a system, weaving – a lovely generative image, by the way – offers ways to do this.
My friend Marcus Jenal published his latest weekly newsletter in which he muses over a few questions related to complexity, strategy and taking a stance. He doesn’t have a comments section enabled on his blog (hint! hint!) so I’m going to respond a bit to what he wrote here and we can have a conversation in this space.
Too often, I fall into the trap of questioning every new insight I have and asking myself if that insight goes deep enough. Every insight is still biased through my cultural coding, my upbringing, my context, etc. Yet by the very nature of being human we will never reach a place of ‘pure’ unbiased understanding. So we need to strike a balance between self-critical reflection and believing that we found some ground that is solid enough to step on and move forward.
It’s like the metaphor of crossing a river on foot. We make a careful step to check if the next stone is stable enough to step on or not. If it is, we make the step and then check which direction we can go from there. If we get stuck, we move a few steps back. But if we never trust the stability of the next stone, we will not move at all. And yes, sometimes we might fall into the water but that’s ok. We can pick ourselves up and start again.
This is one of the biggest blocks I see with folks who are new to complexity work. There is a tension – a polarity even – between needing to move and needing to know. I think that tension is generated by standard problems solving practices that begin with the Cynefin framework’s Ordered Systems formula of “SENSE – ANALYSE – RESPOND.” You start by gathering information you can about the system, have an expert analyse the data and tell you what to do, chart out a path forward and then execute. That is what most problem solving in business and organizational life looks like and it permeates design thinking and action practice.
When I’m teaching people to work in complexity, it’s good to use tools and metaphors that draw on their own experiences in the rest of their life. I am firmly of the belief that human beings are innate complexity workers but our organizational life squishes those capacities out of us, or relegates them to the sidelines of our non-work lives, to hobbies, games, parenting, gardening, cooking, art, and other activities of daily life. In places where we are safe to fail, we can try all kinds of things at our own pace and comfort. We are not paralysed by the fear that someone will yell at us for getting it wrong, or worse, we will be fired, demoted, or thought less of. So many organizations and leaders I work with are paralysed by fear. Ofet they figure out how to download that fear on to their teams and always have someone else to blame if things go wrong. That’s a lot of the work we do when trying to open up leadership practice.
“Why are we stuck?” ask many leaders. “How do you reward failure?” I ask in return. And thus begins the conversation.
These days I just point people to this EXCELLENT Liz and Mollie cartoon to illustrate this:
So yes. We need to act without information. We take up some, have a sense of where we want to go, and then move and the cycle begins.
That leads to the second part of Marcus’s post:
I am re-watching the two conversations between Nora Bateson and Dave Snowden on ‘When meaning looses its meaning’ (Session 1, Session 2) together with a group of friends who are both interested in Nora’s and Dave’s work. We are having fabulous discussions after watching bits of the conversations. While Nora and Dave try hard to agree with each other, of course they have their differences. And these differences are somehow reflected in my own thinking about how to be and act in the world, which I’m expressing in my weekly emails – particularly the dilemma of if/when/how to act. In very strongly simplified terms, Nora advocates for broad, open, purposeless spaces to make connections and relationships that will then sprout into change in whatever way, while Dave sees the possibility of catalysing certain attractors and shifting certain constraints in a more intentional / purposeful way so that new, more desirable things emerge (he calls this ‘nudging’ the system). While it is more obvious with Dave, both have an idea of how a more desirable world would look like: more people would accept that ecological and complexity thinking are better ways to engage with the world than industrial linear thinking. Both, Nora and Dave, take a stance, which allows them to become thought leaders.
It has been lovely watching Nora and Dave dance together and as Marcus rightly identifies, the differences, held in a generative tension, are the interesting bits. I think the tension about direction of travel that Marcus has seized on here is an important polarity to navigate in complexity work.
Direction of travel matters. Call it a moral compass, call it a shared purpose, a shared vision, or a sense of what is right and good, but INTENTION, as Alicia Juarerro will tell you, matters. It serves as an attractor for action and so if you are planning to move, you better be aware of your intention, especially if you think you are just hanging out in a purposeless space. In complexity, there is no space that is free from context. If I am just hanging around with a soft gaze waiting to explore something, that is not an empty space of thinking. My eyes and ears and heart are conditioned and constrained by my history. And that is why Nora’s ideas of “warm data,” as I understand them, are helpful. It helps to populate the purposeless space with enough diversity and possibility that it can be intentionally purposeless.
I learned that a long time ago when I was thinking about Bohmian dialogue in the context of alos developing my practices of invitation. Bohmian dialogue is intentionally open, and, as Harrison Owen once said, “Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened.” That is true and it is alos true that there is always intention in the invitation, and whoever comes has arrived there by virtue of the history of connections that led them to discovering and responding the the invitation. Spaces can be open, but they are never unbounded. Awareness of the boundary conditions is helpful for understanding what is possible and why what happened was “the only thing that could have.” Complex systems have history and that history matters.
So I think this difference that Marcus has found presents us with a nice space to manage within when we are working in complex systems. A range of openness of direction of travel from broad to narrow. At a certain point if you treat the direction of travel like a target you have drifted into the complicated domain in Cynefin, which is fine, if that is truly what you are doing. But targets are not the same as vectors and they inspire very different patterns of behaviour.
Oh and on Marcus’ last question…
PS: I’m not 100% sure what the difference is between ‘taking a stance’ and ‘taking a stand’. Even English native speakers could not really explain it to me consistently.
…I answered him by email saying essentially that a “taking a stance” is a position that you take to prepare for action, and you optimize your ability to engage well to whatever is coming. It’s preparing to move. “Taking a stand” is getting ready not to be moved, to dig in and resist whatever is coming. One could even say it’s another way of thinking about the resilient vs. robust form of dealing with change.